Wochenzeit
Essays for people who do not merely want to measure time.
Once a week: watchmaking, quantum questions, philosophy, thought experiments and the art of not merely spending a moment.
Why Five Minutes Can Feel Like an Hour
Why attention shapes experienced duration while changes in memory shape remembered duration.
When Did the World Begin to Share the Same Time?
How many local times gradually became one shared measure with deliberately different hours.
How Much of an Old Watch Must Remain Original?
Why originality is not a percentage, and how restoration weighs patina, function and historic material.
Who Owns Our Time? II: Why Do We Sell the Most Valuable Thing We Have?
What time clocks, shift work, health and control over working hours reveal about who may command our lifetime.
Who Owns Our Time? I: Why Do We Get Bored Even Though Our Time Is Finite?
Why finitude does not prevent boredom, and what attention, creative incubation and open time reveal.
Why a Shattered Glass Does Not Reassemble Itself
Why entropy makes a shattered glass practically irreversible without absolutely forbidding the return journey.
The Pendulum: Almost Perfect, Never Exact
How amplitude, air resistance, temperature and the escapement alter the pendulum's almost uniform beat.
Why Earth Is a Poor Clock
How UT1, atomic time, UTC and leap seconds reconcile Earth's irregular rotation.
Why GPS Would Not Work Without Einstein
How motion and gravity alter the rate of GPS satellite clocks.
Why a Mechanical Watch Gains or Loses Time
How the balance, spring, position, temperature, power and friction alter a watch's rate.
Every Second Passes Only Once: What Deserves Our Attention
Why attention means selection, without creating a duty to optimise every moment.
Time in Art, Art in Time
How art depicts time, makes it tangible as duration, and is changed by preservation itself.
Time at Sea: How a Clock Found Longitude
How carried reference time and the local Sun made longitude measurable.
Time and Fashion: What Remains When Fashion Moves On?
Why watches are fashion objects yet can outlive fashion: on style, repair and personal choice.
The Einstein Watchmaker Quote: What Is Actually Documented
The quote is unsupported. Einstein's actual role before the Manhattan Project is more complex and more revealing.
Can Quanta Jump Through Time?
What a negative weak time value really means, and why it does not amount to a journey into the past.
What a Clock Knows About Time
How mechanical clocks measure intervals and why accuracy always requires comparison, regulation and care.